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The Adventurers encounter an Insurmountable Waist-High Chair. It's a chest-high wall, Mr. Smarty Pants. Got any more dumb ideas? Maybe we can crowbar it away? Or kick under it? Or gravity gun through it? Frohman: Or climb over it? Soldier: Or climb over it?
You may be an intergalactic warlord stocked with a hand-held nuclear device and laser eyes, but if you think you can just step over a waist-high picket fence, you've got another thing coming, mister.
Leon: There's this little wall in my way that I could easily jump over, but it's not giving me the "jump over it" command. What should I do? Hunnigan: Oh, you have to go around it and find the key. Leon: ...what? -->-- Resident Awesome 4
The phenomenon, found in countless videogames, in which a seemingly trivial obstacle -- such as a Locked Door -- cannot be circumvented or removed with brute force, no matter how powerful the player character(s) is(are). This is more jarring when the obstacle in question does not mark the edge of the gameworld, but rather serves to force the player into taking a particular path.
There are several variations of the Insurmountable Waist Height Fence, such as:
- The Frictionless Hill, where you can jump onto the hillside, only to slide off as if the thing were coated in an industrial lubricant.
- It must be noted that sometimes, usually due to minor glitching, these can be passed with enough effort. Usually by having your character clip into the offending hill or hill-like object while holding the jump button. Or by tapping it while looking for "sweetspots" like clippable ledges, as in games like GTA. Do trial and error tests first. Some, such as 3DO's PO'ed have cumulative jumps, meaning taking the side of a steeply sloped nuclear bomb shelter at the wrong speed and/or angle will result in the character being vertically catapulted over 300 feet into the air upon reaching the top, only to tumble to his doom.
- The Indestructible Fallen Log, which presents you with a fallen tree which, despite your having nuclear weapons in your arsenal, can't even be chipped.
- The Adamantium Door, similar to the Indestructible Fallen Log, but in door form.
- Invisible Walls. Literally.
- The One Inch Too High Ledge, seen mostly in 3D platformers, but not unknown in other styles of game, this ledge is just too high to get onto, no matter how hard you try.
- The Gentle Slope of Unclimbability, which is a slightly inclined piece of land which, despite all logic to the contrary, is completely impassable, both up and down.
- And Knee (or Ankle) Deep Water of Uncrossability, in which anything deeper than a mud puddle may as well be a bottomless pit as far as your ability to ford it is concerned. And that's assuming your character doesn't have Super Drowning Skills as well.
Compare Soup Cans. See also Broken Bridge. Not to be confused with the one-foot-tall brick wall.
Examples:
- No More Heroes features insurmountable ankle-height curbs in various parts of Santa Destroy, the illusory "open" world of the game. The absence of a jump button doesn't help. Poor design, or sophisticated satire? Hard to tell with this game.
- Episode #172
 of the webcomic Concerned made fun of this trope as it applies to the game Half Life 2.
- The mention in the comic of "white picket fences" and "tufts of grass" is almost certainly a reference to the 1982 game Smurf Rescue, in which white picket fences and tufts of grass were obstacles that must be jumped over...because if you touched them, they killed you.
- BLACK features a truly ridiculous example where a knee-high pile of rubble can only be scaled in one direction because there's a plank on that side forming a ramp. This Troper came to calling this phenomenon 'The Invisible Wheelchair' after the device the protagonist is obviously confined to.
- The game Battlefield: Bad Company by all means averts this, as one of the game's
advertised selling features most awesome parts is the fact at least 90% of the environment happens to be destructible. Yes, that includes that entire village of houses and any waist-high fences you might see. Now the edge of the battlefield where the enemy starts lobbing artillery shells at you, on the other hand..
- Countless examples of locked doors seemingly made of flimsy wood being impervious to explosives of all kinds. In Half Life , Gordon Freeman couldn't knock down locked doors with any of the explosives he was carrying, which included grenades and demolition charges. In its expansion pack "Opposing Force" the character of Adrian Sheppard, despite being a trained marine, cannot breach doors unless he enlists the help of an NPC with a blowtorch. Even worse, the NPC must be kept alive during an Escort Mission, if he's killed, the game ends. Sheppard apparently can't just take the blowtorch from the fallen man and use it himself.
- Possibly subverted in Portal, whose last level is rife with Half-Life-style obstacles that are easily bypassed through the use of the Portal Gun.
- But also has locked doors.
- The old RPG Robinson's Requiem abused this trope to death. There were multiple occurrences of Frictionless Hills, Indestructible Logs, One Inch Too High Ledges, and perhaps most annoyingly Gentle Slopes of Unclimbability that sometimes required you to go through caves, jungles and deserts to get to the other side. It was even more maddening when you consider the Slope was 5 meters long and with a 20 degree incline.
- The Brothers in Arms games feature highly physically fit paratroopers who are unable to surmount fences and earthen walls that seemingly only reach them to the waist. Curiously enough, during scripted attacks some enemies are capable of jumping over said fences.
- In the second game Sergeant Matt Baker, an NPC who was the player character in the first game, can be seen climbing over one of those low fences that he could not traverse when he was controlled by the player.
- Finally, in the as yet unreleased third game, all characters (NPCs and player alike) will supposedly be capable of vaulting over fences, sandbags, and the like - and a bazooka or machinegun will rip through them, too.
- The 3D Final Fantasy games generally lack any kind of parkour or jumping, making even the slightest ridge an effective barrier -- though the player can jump in Final Fantasy X-2, which has the interesting effect that the same geography which had appeared in Final Fantasy X could, in places, be approached differently, sometimes allowing new areas to be seamlessly integrated into existing locations. Final Fantasy XII, however, is full of them, including the Knee Deep Water of Uncrossability and the Indestructible Fallen Log. Apparently being able to rend the very fabric of space and time with your magic isn't enough to budge an overgrown twig.
- Final Fantasy XI also contains some particularly irritating examples of this. They don't mark the end of the game world, nor are they a plot element - they just make it take a couple more minutes to get from place to place.
- Each Star Wars game in which the player can use a lightsaber. In the movies and various other media, these have been used to cut through several-inch-thick Unobtainium-steel doors. In the games, they typically have no effect on any barriers whatsoever. Knights of the Old Republic 2 actually allowed you to bash open doors with your lightsaber, but there were still "magnetically sealed" doors that resisted all force.
- This is potentially useful for preventing the player from cutting down a bridge they need to cross, or from breaking an exterior window on a spaceship, but ...
- This troper was EXTREMELY saddened when in the demo for a Star Wars: Episode I game, he couldn't cut through the walls of the spaceship. Someday, maybe. Someday.
- The player character's behavior in the Myst series would seem to indicate that you are an extremely polite crippled geriatric... If not for your ability to rocket up and down flimsy ladders at absurd speeds.
- Related, in Myst III: Exile. How many tropers out there have suspected that they could have taken Saavedro hand to hand? This situation was avoided in Myst II: Riven, as Gehn and his goons always had you behind bars, or covered by lethal projectile weapons, or both.
- In Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, the player can climb or jump -- but cannot climb or jump over fences eighteen inches high, barbed wire lying flat on the ground, or the game's ubiquitous traffic barricades. (But at one point, his path is blocked by a simple wooden gate. Jumping against it will knock it down.)
- The Xenosaga series has particularly stupid example of this. Players will enter areas in their extremely large mecha, but solve a puzzle in order to circumvent a two-foot barrier. This is despite the fact that these robots fly during battle.
- With Lampshade Hanging, when you encounter a certain unopenable door in The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time, your AI Sidekick comments, "I've got a feeling that the room behind this door has neither been modeled nor rendered." Similarly, the original Journeyman Project makes you take the lift straight from your 4th floor apartment to the ground floor transporter booth that takes you to work. Pressing floors 2 or 3 receives a reply of "This floor has neither been modeled nor rendered."
- The Sims in The Sims and its sequel cannot pass between squares separated by walls or fences, which led to the ridiculous experience of surrounding a Sim with an ankle-high white picket fence and watching him starve to death, unable to cross it. As a means of a "fix", The Sims 2 includes higher-than-waist fences only.
- It does, however, have lower-than-ankle-length fences to put around flower beds. Just don't put them all the way around the flower beds, though, or you won't be able to water the flowers.
- The two Red Faction games not only made strides to avert this trope by making much of the environment destroyable, but also sometimes required brute-force breaching to progress with the game. This feature, however, caused those points in the game that were obstructed by indestructible architecture to become only that much more conspicuous.
- There is a certain room in a cave in Star Fox Adventures which requires you to pointlessly trek a longer path around the room even though the entrance and exit to the room are mere feet away from each other, all because a small amount of short grass stands between them.
- In the game Koudelka, the titular character justifies her unwillingness to go over a relatively short fence due to her modesty, one of the very few instances where this phenomenon is addressed in a way consistent with the setting and explained plausibly. Still, you'd think somebody so concerned about modesty wouldn't have dressed like that to begin with...
- In Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, various areas are blocked off by rubble etc., which shouldn't hold too much difficulty for a group of Marvel superheroes. Not only that, but sometimes characters who can fly can completely surmount the barrier, only to find an Invisible Wall.
- In one level of Tomb Raider: Anniversary, you come across several cages. With vertical and horizontal bars, which look like they could be climbed like a ladder. Which you nevertheless cannot climb, for a game which features all sorts of climbing (and actual ladders) in other situations ...
- In a truly odd film example in the remake of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Veruca's father was seeming unable to climb over a waist high safety fence until it was unlocked. He merely stared on as his daughter was overwhelmed by an army of trained squirrels, as she screams and struggles against them dragging her to her doom.
- In the film Hot Shots Part Deux, this trope is ridiculed when a commando unit escaping hostile territory finds their path blocked by a waist-high fence (with a locked wicket) and breaks down in hysterical despair.
- Then Topper tells the demolitionist, "Blow it."
- In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion it is possible, through the use of multiply stacked buffs, to attain superhuman "Acrobatics" skill levels, at which point the use of Invisible Walls by the game designers becomes apparent, e.g. when the player cannot cross some pieces of rubble, despite obviously clearing them by a huge margin. On the other hand, even an unmodified Acrobatics skill, in the upper ranges of what is normally attainable, enables the player to reach the roof tops in several of the cities, and from there the city walls and thus the outside of the city - which should have been kept inaccessible, since this reveals that outside world is only an empty, low-resolution copy of the proper game world, which one reaches by exiting through the gates. In the expansion pack Shivering Isles this editor has witnessed some of the guardians patrolling the landscape being stymied by a combination of ankle deep water - which they refused to cross - and a slope that was just too steep to be climbed at their normal walking speed, so that they ended up treading in place for minutes on end.
- This has been parodied in dozens of comics. This from Adventurers! is one example this editor finds iconic enough.
- Another one from the same comic is featured above.
- Parodied in The Simpsons Movie, where a concrete barricade of a similar height was all that was needed to idiot-proof the river to ensure no more illegal dumping (Of course the resident idiot, Cletus, was used to test it. Even more of course, they tested it using the wrong idiot...)
- Tony Montana in Scarface: The World Is Yours is a clear offender whose trespasses include the One Inch Too High Ledge and the Gentle Slope of Unclimbability. Despite being strong enough to run at a decent clip with a bazooka in hand, he cannot climb out of the deepest end of a wading pool. Also if you swim to far in the ocean you get eaten by a shark.
- In Cave Story, early in the plot a locked door provides an obstacle, and a friendly nearby robot is willing to create explosives (out of chewing gum, for some reason) to break it open. This ignores the fact that the main character is equipped with a missile launcher...
- Although since Cave Story is a 2D game, it probably has something to do with the fact that no matter how he tries your poor little protagonist can't actually point his missile launcher at the door.
- Well, then again, the missile launcher could be more of an RPG, in which case it explodes with shrapnel rether than an actual high explosives kind of thing. Also, the door wasn't locked, it was rusted shut- if it were made of solid metal, it might require more than a handheld missile launcher/RPG to open it.
- The 2-D Legend Of Zelda games provide many obvious examples of this, with a plethora of simple obstacles that nevertheless require you to find a powerup first. Move past a bush? Not without your sword. Step over a small rock? Forget it unless you got your power glove. A small tree? Nope, only if you got the fire wand.
- The fences in Ocarina of Time's Hyrule field. While they come up to adult Link's waist, Link on Epona's back must jump over one in particular it as if it were a high fence, and only then at a very particular angle.
- In the Resident Evil game series the protagonists, even though they are either well trained members of the Raccoon City Police's special task-force S.T.A.R.S. and/or are able to perform insane stunts like jumping down stairs while fetching a gun in mid-air and shoot gas tanks to kill an entire team of evil grunts one-handed, are overstrained when facing old, battered wooden doors they don't got the right key for. This trope becomes especially comic if the player is circled by a pack of zombies who will tear him apart any second and his only escape route would be through an old rusty garden gate, but he'd rather stop any attempts of escaping saying to himself "It's locked. I don't have the right key to open it". Further, in numerous cut-scenes the protagonists find themself in exactly the same situation, but will then suddenly remember their training back at the police academy and simply breach the door which leads to their escape route.
- This gets even more ridiculous in the first Resident Evil game, where Jill Valentine, ex-Delta Force and current S.T.A.R.S member, complete with pistols, machine guns, and even rocket launchers, is equipped with a lock-pick and has been dubbed "The Master of Unlocking", still cannot go through the very same wooden doors. It gets even more absurd when a cut-scene in the game which shows Jill trapped in a locked room being rescued by another member who promptly just shoots the lock off the door to rescue her.
- Resident Evil 4 however, with its redefined control scheme, makes it easy to just hit the Action button to jump over any sufficiently low fence when prompted. Of course, this only serves to make the game's proper insurmountable waist height fences more jarring when you have to perform an irritating Fetch Quest for a gate key instead of just jumping over the gate.
- Even worse was the 'Seperate Ways' bonus chapters present in the PS 2 and subsequent versions of the game, in which you get to play as Ada Wong. The girl with the Legend Of Zelda style hookshot that can attach to anything. Since the device was entirely governed by action commands, the game just dictated when you could zip over obstacles, and when you had to run off on a 16-room detour.
- How this entry got so far without the literal insurmountable waist-high fence in Paper Mario is beyond the comprehension of this troper. Early in the game, when you first get too toad town, you'll see a Star Piece on the other side of a fence, which you have absolutely no way of getting past until you get Sushie 5 chapters later, even though you can jump HIGHER than the fence to begin with.
- Kingdom Hearts is an exception to this trope mostly due to incredibly well designed levels that allow you to go nearly anywhere you can jump. Only in a few places do you come in contact with invisible walls, almost all belonging to the level in which you can fly. Kingdom Hearts 2 is a prime example of this trope, however, where an overturned semi blocks your passage even though you can jump higher than the truck and the surface on top of the truck appears flat, leaving this editor baffled by why he couldn't land on it.
- In the finale of the movie adaptation of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, a platoon of Vogons - all of whom are carrying Kill-O-Zap guns - are thwarted when a picket fence is closed in their path. Kinda justified, as they are an extremely Lawful Stupid who would probably unthinkingly obey the implied rule of 'don't climb over the fence'.
- Actually, it was probably because they needed to go and fill out the right paperwork (in triplicate, of course...).
- Happens a lot in Drakengard, especially in any scenes involving ruins or recently-destroyed buildings.
- The original Super Mario Kart had this problem, but even worse. All barriers were flat on the ground, being, at most, ankle high. Yet they were completely impassable.
- Not true, in one of the battle stages you can jump over the barriers into the little puddles. So inability to jump elswhere is a case of Invisible Walls.
- Note that this had to do with the constraints of the SNES and its Mode 7.
- Pokémon is an interesting example: Your character can jump down ledges that appear to be only knee high, but not back up them. The bikes in the newer games make this problem even weirder, as you can now ride your bike up a mudslide twice as tall as your character or bunnyhop up tiny footholds in a cliff face but still can't go over these tiny bumps.
- This is due to the way the sprites worked in the older games; the ledges were supposed to be much taller than they looked.
- Averted in Net Hack, where you can do things like use pick-axes to laboriously dig through the dungeon rock to make new paths. This is coupled with being able to break down doors and generally destroy most of the environment if you have enough resources to do so. (Though be careful if there's a shopkeeper on the other side of the door!) Note that the edges of the two-dimensional world still qualify as an Invisible Wall.
- And also a Fourth Wall, use a stethoscope on the top of the screen and you'll hear a faint typing noise. NetHack is awesome.
- In Alphaman, a comedy game similar to Net Hack, if the player has a jackhammer, he/she can sometimes jack through the exterior walls of a building. When that happens, the player can walk the black void of the outside of the house, and if they leave the screen, they're taken out of the house to the land near the house. Also sort of an example of Super Drowning Skills, because without a wetsuit, raft, kayak, or something similar, the player drowns in deep water.
- In Terranigma, you can jump. Sometimes you can jump over gaps. Other times, you run into an invisible wall. Sometimes you can jump down deep holes in the ground. Other times, you just take damage and are put back where you fell from. Still other times, you hit invisible walls. The only way to find out is to try.
- Sid Meier's Pirates! uses a literal Insurmountable Waist High Fence, to the player's advantage. During the stealth segments of the game, the player can leap over a fence to avoid guards, who, despite being able to see you clearly on the other side, are too fat and lazy to climb over and arrest you.
- Sometimes justified in Urban Chaos: Riot Responce. Sometimes the obstacles make sense, like the fact the alley way in on fire, or the stairs are blocked by burning debris. Other times he can'y climbed over a single row of crates. But that could be because he is carrying a small armory by that time.
- Gran Turismo IV has particularly strong plastic fences. On the Grand Canyon rally course, part of the course travels along the very edge of a cliff with only a foot-tall plastic home depot orange netting keeping a runaway car (or Truck) from careening off the edge. Somehow this flimsy-looking fencing handles the task incredibly well, even so far as bringing a full size Dodge Ram truck doing well over freeway speed to a dead stop.
- The most excessive and egregious example this troper can think of comes from Baten Kaitos. In this game world, EVERYONE has wings. Everyone. Theres alot of nifty flying animation in battle. And yet you still get the same variety of of jumping and bridging puzzles that would be completely passable if you thought to fly outside of battle when it was useful, rather than when it just looked cool.
- Partially justified in the game Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee. Munch is a Gabbit, a one-legged amphibian, and though he can jump more than six feet out of the water, any attempt to jump on land just makes him fall flat on his face. Abe, on the other hand, is a ground-dwelling Mudokon, and can jump really high on the ground (though he has Super Drowning Skills, and can only touch water for a few seconds before dying). However, other Mudokons are too stupid and lazy to jump over as waist high fence, they have to be picked up one by one and thrown over fences. Munch can also clear small fences by jumping over them in his wheelchair, or getting a boost from Abe.
- Apparently, this is so well-known that audiences at GDC '08 actually laughed when they saw a character in the upcoming Fable 2 simply jump over a waist-high fence.
- Which will be a relief, as the original Fable was absolutely full of insurmountable fences, rivers, edges, invisible walls, weeds, etc.
- Truthin Television: This troper's brother tried to climb over a waist-high fence, and broke his arms.
- And this troper has encountered ankle-deep streams that he was unwilling to ford. However, most video-game rivers are placid lowland rivers, not the spring-flood-swollen mountain stream that had risen to be ankle-deep over the now-incredibly-slippery footbridge.
- If you can't stand this trope, don't play Travians. The game concept appears to be made entirely around this trope and Broken Bridge. You can't deviate from little paths that run everywhere, even to cross entirely empty fields so as to bypass the wagon blocking the path. You can't use the axe you got to chop wood to chop the beech tree, and the special axe you get to chop the beech tree you can't use to chop either a small branch blocking one road or a fallen tree blocking another. (This despite the fact that the special axe is specifically given to you more than a one-use item, so it presumably has other uses down the line.) And you can walk through woody areas if the game lets you but not less densely wooded areas if the game really wants you to take the path around.
- Dreamfall is full of these, this editor's favorite being insurmountable ankle-height rope. Particularly jarring since Zoë is otherwise keen on pointing out and complaining about adventure game cliches but this one is played straight.
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